Book Review: Jonathan Kozol Offers Up a Slice of Hope

Still hopeful: Author and activist Jonathan Kozol

This is not the book I was expecting. Author and activist Jonathan Kozol has been chronicling American inner-city poverty for three decades, in several books as well as regular contributions to such tawny publications as The New York Times, The Atlantic and Harper’s, where he is an editor. His central focus is poor children and the crumbling vestiges of the public education and housing systems available to them. As such, his work tends to be a little, er, bleak.

Fire in the Ashes is a different kind of book entirely. In it, he checks in with some of the families he met while writing about The Martinique, a New York slum hotel for the homeless, in the mid-1980s. One of the last shelters on the island of Manhattan, the building was a wasteland of crackheads, crime, hungry illiterate children and open shake-downs by “Security,” the kind of face-smacking destitution that no amount of The Wire can prepare you for.

Kozol has stayed in touch with many of the families he met there in the decades since, and Fire in the Ashes is about what happens to the children after their stay at this ground zero of poverty and political hopelessness. Their stories range from woeful Dickensian tragedies of a low birth and lifelong strife to truly inspiring tales of those who somehow managed to prevail against the most crushing of circumstances. A few, like one mother, Vicki, and her children Lisette and Eric, demonstrate how hard it is to escape from the ghetto mentality, even once a family has been physically removed, as one child thrives and the other gets mired in drug use and criminality.

For the most part, though, Kozol focuses on the kids who work their butts off for an academic scholarship, who get married and become dental technicians, who serve a few stints in jail and then clean up and fly straight. The book’s structure works well to this end; by opening with a few sad tales to illustrate just how deep the psychological scars of poverty run, his later success stories are all the more heartwarming.

Kozol knows his stuff, and he clearly has strong bonds with the people he depicts. His attachment and commitment to the disenfranchised is contagious; as a generally pretty stone-faced reader, I cried an embarrassing number of times in public while reading it, in the very best way.

While Jonathan Kozol remains the go-to guy for political coverage of race, housing and education in poor America, this book reminds that being that guy takes a lot of heart, and that there is hope inherent in activism. ■

Fire in the Ashes, 2012, 355 pp., $27 hardcover, Crown Publishers.